1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a water-conditioning cartridge, with a housing that encloses an ion exchanger and can be screwed via a screw thread onto a cartridge-connecting fitting. The cartridge is provided with a water inlet for admission of untreated water, especially from a water-supply system, and with a water outlet, which is connected or can be connected to a consuming component, especially a beverage machine.
2. The Prior Art
Water-conditioning cartridges of the type mentioned hereinabove are known from DE 38 26 857 A1, for example, and are used among other purposes in restaurants or cafes for conditioning of untreated water for beverage machines, such as coffee machines, when the untreated water drawn from a public water-supply system does not satisfy the requirements imposed by the operator on the flavor or other quality of the water or by the beverage machine on the purity thereof.
Different ion exchangers are contained in water-conditioning cartridges depending on the intended use. Such intended uses include partial demineralization to remove calcium and magnesium from the untreated water, complete demineralization to remove all ions from the untreated water, softening to lower the content of water hardeners or nitrate removal for health reasons. Confusion about the ion exchanger can lead among other results to impairment of the flavor of the prepared beverage or of operation of the beverage machine, for example by lime or boiler-scale deposits. Accordingly, such confusion should be prevented if at all possible, but preventing confusion cannot be assured merely by appropriate labeling of the cartridges.
In principle, it would certainly be possible to provide the water-conditioning cartridges with screw threads of different dimensions corresponding to the respective content and intended use, but doing so would necessitate producing a specific cartridge-connecting fitting with a complementary thread for each type of water-conditioning cartridge. This possibility not only causes relatively high complexity in terms of design, manufacture and warehousing, but also, in the case of replacement of the beverage machine, does not even allow the cartridge-connecting fitting to be newly reconfigured for a different water-conditioning cartridge.